“After you make that decision, IDrive will open the Backup tab, ready to upload your documents, music, and other user folders. A private encryption key secures your data under a second layer of encryption so that even the IDrive service cannot access your data (with caveats, which I’ll talk about in a moment). You’ll want to make this decision now, since if you change your mind later, you’d have to re-upload your entire backup. iDrive - Backup and RecoveryWhen you sign up for IDrive and install the program, you’ll be asked whether you want to use a private encryption key to secure your backups. IDrive just doesn’t have a very polished design like some of its competitors (Acronis and SpiderOak, for example). (This is common all over IDrive, from the program to the website to the customer support-English doesn’t seem to be the first language of its creators.) Thankfully, most options have a little “?” icon that you can hover over to get more information about what the feature does. During Disk Image backup, you’re prompted to “select the drive you wish to create Disk Image,” which-besides not being a complete sentence-is a little confusing at first. For example, to restore files from a certain date, you click the “Snapshots” button. Everything is where you’d expect it to be, but some options are confusingly worded. All that comes in a neat desktop package that’s pretty easy to navigate. Oh, and it has loads of settings to customize your backups, most of which are accessible from the web, so you can manage your backups remotely. You can schedule backups as you like, including “continuous” backups that upload files as they’re changed. You can even create full disk image backups and restore them using a boot disk if anything ever goes wrong with your system. On top of that, IDrive contains a file syncing and sharing service through a folder on your PC, à la Dropbox. This is a huge bonus, and while those files take up space, it means you’ll never ask yourself “Hey, where’d that file go?” like you would with more limited services. IDrive keeps up to 10 versions of your old files, but doesn’t remove deleted files from your backup, ever, until you manually click the “Archive” button. “Even at its “normal” price of $70 per year, you get a lot for your money.

Idrive online backup review